Posted on 06/20/2005 12:38:02 PM PDT by anonymoussierra
Listen; there are two main factions of political thought in the human race. One faction traces its lineage back to Socrates and his student/publisher Plato. Socrates voluntarily took the hemlock and died for “the truth” as he saw it.
The other faction traces its lineage back to Plato’s friend Aristotle. Aristotle trained Alexander in the art of war who made lots of others die for “the truth” as he saw it.
Modern analogs of these two factions are the person who parks his alternative fuel vehicle with the “Visualize Peace” bumper sticker in front of his modest home; while the other parks his F150 pickup with the NRA decal and the “my dead hands” bumper sticker in front of his somewhat grander home.
If you were a thief on the prowl, which house would you victimize? Well, the same metaphor applies to nations. While Plato’s teachings are invaluable – I particularly love his “Parable of the Cave” – his followers are extremely dangerous in time of war.
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For example, read what Teresa HEINZ kerry said yesterday:
“The way we live in peace in a family, in a marriage, in the world, is not by threatening people, is not by showing off your muscles. It's by listening, by giving a hand sometimes, by being intelligent, by being open and by setting high standards," she said at the CSU rally.”
As nice as this sounds, it’s a formula for suicide in times like now. Here’s another quote from an earlier post of mine on why pacifism is evil:
“In another enlightening example, a group of prominent British clergymen wanted to travel to Manchuria and “place their bodies physically between the Japanese and Chinese armies” believing that their pacifist woo woos would somehow stop those murderers in their tracks and bring about peace and harmony to that sadly brutalized continent.”
http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/john_f_kerry_is.html
Finally, here is a more thorough exposition on this theory:
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The Two Defining Perspectives of Civilization Chapter 8 Two thousand four hundred years ago, inspired by Homer; Socrates taught Plato; then Plato taught Aristotle; and then Aristotle taught Alexander. Alexander’s generals (Cassander in Macedonia, Lysimachos in Thrace, Ptolemy in Egypt, Antigonus in Asia and Seleukus in Syria) and their descendents ruled much of the known world expanding the Hellenic world far beyond Attica for several hundred more years. In 230 B.C. Eratasthones determined that the Earth was round and accurately measured its circumference by comparing the noon time shadows at two different points on the Earth’s surface. He was the first to realize it orbited the sun. Shortly after that, powerful legions of the Roman Republic destroyed Carthage and defeated Ma-cedonia and Sparta. Thus freed from Carthaginian and Greek competition, Rome finally became the greatest power on Earth. Everything we need to know about modern politics can be learned by studying that extraordinary chain of ambition and wisdom. Thus the two great political perspectives of Western Civilization which are based on the two main Schools of Civic Virtues as defined by Plato and Aristotle have their recorded roots in the Greek peninsula dating back to when modern consciousness was still very young. Aristotle’s civic virtues were based in action, courage, duty and honor while Plato’s civic virtues were based in metaphysical ideals – in thinking about thinking. The Democrats and Republicans each represent one of school of civic virtue branches that have animated human affairs since the dawn of political consciousness. In a very real way, Democrats and Republicans are each HALF-BRAINED, each representing one of the two important perspectives of human affairs. No individual, institution or government can claim wisdom until it has effectively integrated both branches (halves) into a complete model of human political thought – what I call Bilateral Consciousness.
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will use Aristotle and Plato to personify these branches. Aristotelians believe in worldly suc-cess as measured by achievement, wealth, friends, duty and comfort. As symbolized by Raph-ael’s painting above, Plato points to the sky implying the importance of metaphysics while his student Aristotle’s palm is faced towards the Earth. Aristotle's most famous pupil, Alexander III of Macedonia, exemplified the master’s teaching as he conquered the known world. His restless spirit continued through to Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte. Although his life was brief and his empire fleeting, his affect on western civilization lives on today. In fact, Aristotelians totally dominated the leadership of human affairs until the success of Christianity around eight hundred years later. The American Revolution was Aristotelian in design and implementation, which helps to explain the material success of the USA. In contrast; the extreme end of the Aristotelian spectrum, the Nazis, were an example of Aristotelian Totalitarians. The Platonics, on the other hand, have a more spiritual focus. Abstract ideas of good and evil, equality, fairness and Godliness were more important to them. Material matters were considered beneath them and often flamboyantly neglected. Jesus Christ was the first great man of this branch to achieve impact in the West. Saint Francis of Assisi (1200 AD) who was born a rich man’s son, exemplified this trend in his rejection of pride and wealth as he and his followers pur-sued spiritual purity through vows of poverty and the practice of begging for food, clothing and shelter. In fact, during the spiritually fertile sixteenth century prominent Catholic thinkers actu-ally referred to Saint Socrates, Plato’s tutor who had the strange habit of never writing anything down, and who therefore left to Plato the only written expression of his deepest thoughts. The Protestant Reformation began an Aristotelian counterpunch to the Roman Catholic/Platonic dominance of the prior thousand years broadening the intellectual reach of Global Christianity so that it incorporated both main branches of thought. The French and Russian Revolutions were totally Platonic in character even continuing the characteristic brutality of the Catholic Church’s vicious treatment of heretics.
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The modern European social democracies, while Platonic in nature, owe their wealth primarily to their Aristotelian predecessors. At the extreme end of the Platonic scale, Communism is an example of Platonic Totalitarianism. Glorifying the vicious envy of the proletariat, the prime mo-tive principal of Communism and Socialism, is apparently worth the obvious trade-off in human performance and the resulting shared shabbiness of person and place that results. As indicated earlier, Nazis and Communists represent the extreme poles of the Aristotle-Plato scale. While they were both evil, totalitarian societies, they were very different in the quality of their material culture. The Nazis drove Mercedes and Audis and owned their own well made, well kept houses in neat villages while the Communists owned Ladas if they were lucky and were crowded into massive, drab, run down apartment blocks. Even in their worst incarnations, Aristotelians live much better than Platonics. Now, while the American Revolution was Aristotelian in implementation, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, due to its purposeful design, brilliantly integrated both branches in its tripartite design of the United States Federal Government. Adams and Jefferson clearly represented the two perspectives and had an extremely stormy rela-tionship because of it. The third President was the second President’s Vice President and they hardly talked to each other. Jefferson beat Adams when Adams ran for reelection in 1800 by having Aaron Burr bribe the New York electors. Adams refused to attend Jefferson’s inaugural and the two former friends didn’t talk for many years. Yet, according to Alfred North Whitehead these two men represented the “greatest ruling elite since the time of Rome under Caesar Augustus.” These two great men knew they were present at the creation of something very special – it was, in fact, the only successful revolution in World History - and had early on told their wives to save all their documents. Their letters were actually written directly to us as well as to each other and this actually kept these very real men on their best behavior. It is interesting how we forget the broad intellectual and emotional diversity of the Founding Fathers. We now know that those great men succeeded in their goal of creating a constitution that created a machine that could run itself for centuries.
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The USA was the first society that regularly allowed talent to rise to the top despite low birth status. If he lived in England George Washington himself would never have been more than a major. But great crises inspire great leaders and Washington became THE MAN in the new world. Lately, however, in the USA, a fourth branch of government, unplanned for by the founding fa-thers and not answerable to the electorate, has taken on the role of indoctrinating our children in left liberal philosophies. Sadly, the noble Platonic search for the ultimate good has been hijacked by the institutionalized leftwing intelligentsia. The philosophy of the left is obviously immoral at its very foundation because of its fundamental strategy of forcefully appropriating the assets of the citizenry and using those assets to pay its supporters and clients through questionable schemes that are inspired by guilt and guided by misunderstanding that are anathema to much of that citizenry. As a result, that great nineteenth century development, the public school, has been purloined by social ideologues more intent on “fixing” society than teaching literacy. For instance, recently a unionized, certified, Boston Public School eighth grade science teacher with a bachelor’s degree from a school of education of my acquaintance complained that she had to study the solar system because she had to teach it to her class the next day and she “didn’t know a thing about it.” I wondered what those kids would actually learn the next day, especially if, as is likely, she was distracted by her family responsibilities and didn’t get a chance to study it. This is a tragedy! And to add insult to injury, the education establishment now shamelessly blames parents for de-clining educational accomplishment claiming that parental lack of interest in their own children is to blame rather than the obvious incompetence of our schooling establishment. This shame-less shirk of responsibility totally flies in the face of common sense since the superior educa-tional accomplishments of older generations were achieved with much less parental involvement than is now the norm.
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Those American children unfortunate enough to attend our public schools are learning that busi-nessmen are greedy and bureaucrats are wise; that abortion isn’t killing; that esteem needn’t be earned; that the lazy are as good as the ambitious; that businesses poison the environment; that profits are evil; that Western Civilization was cruel and oppressive; that all cultures, no matter how incompetent, are equal; that women’s hurt feelings are legally actionable; that men oppress women and that the government will take care of you. It is now obvious that the teacher’s colleges and unions are acting as the propaganda ministry of the Left Liberal Establishment religion, a more benign modern incarnation of the Hitler Youth, rather than as the stewards of Western Civilization and traditional American values. In the past, our schools passed on the “shared myths” that strengthened the social cohesion of our people and nation. Now they destroy them and divide us. It is now time for our citizens to stand up to the propagandists of leftwing decadence and consciously design or rediscover the myths that we want to guide and motivate our children and our culture. In August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King made a profound point in front of thousands of mostly black Americans from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A point that has since been totally ignored by his successors. He did nothing less than recognize the most important determinate of human success. A trait so dominating in its importance, that it not only determines the happiness of individuals, but accurately predicts the destiny of individuals, peoples and nations. People and the regimes they choose to govern them prosper according to the level of character at which they function. Exactly what is this character that Dr. King referred to? The Brooklyn born psychologist Abra-ham Mazlow hinted at it when he brilliantly modeled the foundation of the Human Condition in his book “Toward a Psychology of Being” wherein he explained the ubiquitous “Hierarchy of Human Needs.” But he also warned- “If we wish to help humans become more fully human, we must realize not only that they try to realize themselves, but that they are also reluctant or afraid or unable to do so. Only by fully appreciating this dialectic between sickness and health can we help to tip the balance in favor of health.” Here, Mazlow clearly points out the difference between competence and incompetence, which he calls sickness. Competence and discipline make up character. Unfortunately, Prof. Mazlow didn’t pretend to have any answers but rather expressed a constant optimism based on his view of the intrinsic inner goodness of human beings.
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“This inner nature, as much as we know of it so far, seems not to be intrinsically evil, but rather either neutral or positively good.” Thus, Prof. Mazlow gave us a beautiful picture of the landscape of human nature but left us without the map to health and competence. MAZLOW’S Hierarchy of Human Needs: 1. Physiological needs a. Air b. Food c. Water d. Shelter 2. Needs for safety and stability a. Stability of life b. Material gain c. To stay away from danger 3. Social desire a. To be a member b. To gain a reputation c. To be trusted 4. Needs for self a. To be recognized by others b. To be self-dependent c. To be confident of self d. To be responsible for own work 5. Needs for self realization a. To be creative b. To show own capability c. To realize hidden ability The political appeal to equality, which is the justification of envy, is used by the Left to excuse the murdering of tens of millions of innocent people. It is comparable in evil to the political ap-peal to racism of the Right - Nazis. However, the Right in the USA has abandoned racism as a political tactic, while the demagogs of the Left still proudly trumpet the destruction of “unfair-ness” as their principal rallying call. The Hierarchy of Character, that follows, will show that the road to Self Actualization for all is paved with grace rather than envy. Envy has been the most damaging human emotion of the past two centuries, much more so than greed, because of the way it has been used to justify cruelty on a massive scale. In fact, you could say that envy is simply resentment plus greed. Perhaps it’s time for the left to stop calling the right greedy. Since the Left will never convince the Right and the Right will never convince the Left, and since both are actually needed to provide a whole, the Heaven we’ll design will have sectors wherein each perspective predominates, such as the spiritually rich but materially shabby Level-leria and the materially rich and spiritually simple Libertaria. This is illustrated in the prophetic chapters of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.
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The great inability of the Left’s adherents to see the utter, practical failure and waste of resources of their schemes is testimony to their hunger for power and the ability of belief to trump reality. There must be a genetic aspect to this situation (epigenetic rules). Now that the Left’s schemes are a clearly documented failure, it is time for the principal branches of western political thought, Platonics and Aristotelians, to shift their battles to what I will show in the next chapter is now clearly the biggest threat to the future of our species… our DANGEROUS NEW TECHNOLO-GIES. THE APPROPRIATE POLITICAL DEBATE FOR THE FUTURE IS BETWEEN TECH-NOLOGISTS AND ANTI-TECHNOLOGISTS (LUDDITES). The Hierarchy of Character: 1) Sociopaths - committed to one’s self only - Anarchy a) People live in a chaotic environment b) Criminals, renegades, outcasts who steel each other’s possessions 2) Hominids - committed to one’s family only – Band of Hunter Gatherers a) People live in a dangerous environment b) Earliest political structure inherited from our ape ancestors 3) Right wing politicians - committed to one’s ethnic compatriots – Tribe or Chiefdom a) People live in larger more settled groups surrounded by enemies b) Second stage of Human Political Development 4) Left wing politicians – committed to everyone - confiscates other peoples resources as booty, tribute or taxes to keep or give to those supposedly in need (those at or below Mazlow’s level 3) – Monarchy, Socialism, Communism a) Phony compassion b) Used by demagogues seeking and keeping power c) Caps the needy’s development at Mazlow’s level 3 5) Left wing academics - shares own resources with those in need - Noblesse Oblige a) True generosity b) Genuine attempt to alleviate suffering and unfairness c) Still caps the needy’s development at Mazlow’s level 3 6) Libertarians - empowers those in need to marshal their own resources to meet their own needs – Libertarian Democracy a) True Compassion b) Uses sense of unfairness to motivate achievement c) Supports the needy’s achievement of Mazlow’s levels 4 and 5 d) Never really achieved for all We all operate at different levels of the Hierarchy of Character from time-to-time. Interestingly, many of the finest people I’ve known are half-brainedly stuck in level five. It seems that the leap to level six is invisible to many fine people. Now, let’s contrast the goals of “True Compassion” (the Hierarchy of Character level six) with the goals of “Phony Compassion” (the Hierarchy of Character level four) – as most famously illustrated when a US President soulfully told his supporters- “I feel your pain.” “True Compassion” supports the Needy in achieving independence and health on their own and turns them into contributors to society. It encourages a culture of competence, productivity, generosity, morality and accomplishment. “Phony Compassion” comforts and justifies the incompetent (Needy) in their sickness (Mazlow’s term), encourages their dependence and pits groups against each other in a fight for resources. It encourages a culture of favor seeking, jealousy, greed, immorality and failure.
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Since politics and culture are like the front and back of the hand, and together determine the hu-man condition in any particular jurisdiction, the lessons of the Hierarchy of Character need to be politically and culturally implemented. Popular Democracy by itself has a very spotty record as far as providing security of person, family and property to all concerned. Left to itself, pure democracy always results in interest groups jockeying to steal each other’s resources (level 4 at best). Contrary to current conventional wisdom, all political and cultural systems aren’t equal. Totali-tarian dictatorships operate in level 2, authoritarian oligarchies operate in level 3, the Social De-mocrats are committed to level 4, Republicans talk about how great level 5 is, and Libertarians are committed to level 6. The bottom of the hierarchy is where Brute Power is the main strategy, Favor Seeking and Rent Collecting works in the middle, only at the very top does commitment to hard work and quality production make sense. Therefore, the highest-level political system is a democracy designed to advance its citizenry up the Hierarchies of Human Needs and Character and that has an integrative political system rather than a combative win-lose system. In such a polis, all public debates are framed by the mandate to advance the hierarchies. The Hierarchy of Character clearly illustrates that the political pursuit of fairness, in addition to being impossible, actually prevents the achievement of competence (health) and promotes incompetence (sickness). As Mark Twain observed during his 19th-century tour of Europe – “Kings are pirates.” There is no doubt that should he return for a fin de siecle tour of the modern USA, he would say that our monster government is also made up of pirates. The very act of extracting taxes, under the pain of arrest, trial and prison, and using those moneys in schemes anathema to a large portion of those taxpayers, is plainly WRONG. This is the moral failure of the Left. Government has a few extremely important responsibilities, and once it exceeds those responsi-bilities it risks the alienation of significant portions of its citizenry and therefore loses legitimacy. To maintain legitimacy for ALL ITS CITIZENS, government must restrict its activities to those domains that all (at least most) of its citizens approve of, namely – 1) Provide for military defense 2) Provide for civil defense - police force 3) Conduct foreign policy 4) Provide for a judicial system a. protect individual rights b. protect the environment c. enforce contracts d. punish criminals 5) Infrastructure creation and maintenance 6) Provide education for those who can’t afford it through vouchers 7) Provide for Basic Scientific Research a. dangerous technology management b. health related research 8) Provide a stable currency One of the best ways to ensure this strategy of statecraft is to require a super majority of 60% on all matters except for matters of war and survival which would require a bare majority. I also suggest a New Social Contract wherein citizens actually sign on to agree to the amount of gov-ernment they want and are willing to pay for. Parents’ agreements would cover their children ‘til they reach the age of consent at which point we could have a coming-of-age ceremony where the new citizens sign on at their desired level. Foreign policy based on the Morality of the Modern Era is limited to protecting the lives, proper-ties, and interests of a nation’s citizens both at home and abroad. Nation building and foreign aid have exasperated the problems of the INCOMPETENT WORLD by lining the pockets of their kleptocrartic elites and are therefore to be avoided. The Marshall Plan worked because the re-cipient countries had long histories of competence and hard work. Nation building and foreign aid have never worked in countries with histories of incompetence. There are two moral avenues for escape from incompetence available to the unfortunate citizens of those afflicted countries. 1. They can model themselves after the competent country of their choice and get to work on their own, or, 2. They can petition a competent country to take over their sovereignty under the following suggested terms – a. A super majority of 2/3 of the population must approve the sovereignty transfer in a plebiscite, b. The sovereignty transfer must be permanent and complete c. Citizens will have a non-voting Associate Citizen status until competence is achieved by their polis. The salient feature of the Statecraft of the Modern Era is how it integrates the two historic per-spectives in policy building and limits the domain of public policy by the simple requirement of a super legislative majority before any regular law or bill is enacted.
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The USA isn’t great because the Democrats are great. The USA isn’t great because the Republi-cans are great. In fact, both parties are rather infantile in the way they conduct their elections and the legislative rhetoric they indulge in. The USA is great because the Democrats and Republicans TOGETHER are great. It’s the DOUBLE-BRAIN effect, as Jacques Barzun calls it that results in more accurate definition of problems and building of more effective policy than would be possible with the HALF-BRAINED approach of one party or the other. It’s the difference between seeing just one side of the mountain or seeing both sides. Knowledge of the need for more than one perspective to fully understand problems has been part of human understanding for thousands of years. In written form, we can trace this crucial con-cept to Plato and his parable of the cave, and, even earlier, to the Buddha’s tale of the elephant and the blind men, parts of both of which are included in this book. However, this principle only made its first formal appearance in the government of men’s affairs in Philadelphia in 1787 when the founding fathers designed our separate but equal tripartite government of executive, legislative and judiciary branches. It was further entrenched by the distillation of our political consciousness to two principal parties, the Republicans and Democ-rats. Having only two major parties is far better than having several special interest parties. The problem of horse trading between special interests at the expense of everyone else is far greater when each interest group has their own party. It is no accident that the greatest mischief has been done by our government during periods when one party ruled both the Executive and Legislative branches and was therefore able to enact their half-brained schemes into law without having them moderated by the other party’s perspective. Almost without exception these laws have done more harm than good. Additionally, Bilateral Consciousness is very useful in communications between the sexes. Men and women have different perspectives and structures of interpretation on most everything and intergender communications should really be approached as cross-cultural communications. Men automatically know what to expect from other men in their circle of acquaintance, but are frequently baffled by the reactions of women to their communications or lack thereof. And women also know what to expect from other women and are equally baffled by their communications with men. In cross-gender communications, men and women need to forget their standard same-sex com-munication styles and study those of their opposites. Too many marriages have been ruined by women who want their husbands to communicate like girlfriends. Most men will never be as verbally adept as women. Men’s relationships with men are usually about doing things together, about action, about playing together, not about talking about things. Women’s relationships with women are about talking about the people in their lives and how they look or what they said and how they feel. Most men could never sit still for this kind of communication. Men and women need each other most profoundly, but men still need men friends and women still need women friends, and, most importantly, they need to understand the differences. Another modern example of Half Brainedness is the feminist movement. The concept of a movement promoting the interests of one half of the population at the expense of the interests of the other half is obviously seriously flawed. The justification offered that women were oppressed loses much validity because the record indicates that most women don’t feel oppressed at all. With the possible exception perhaps, of the small but significant number who were leftists and who’s worldviews innately posits victims and exploiters where most of us just see workers, managers and entrepreneurs.
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The really ugly blot on feminism, however, is the suffering of the children who were forced to grow up without fathers because their mothers had more important priorities than the welfare of their families. The welfare of children must take precedence over the whims of their parents. Parenthood is a choice that carries very serious responsibilities and must not be entered into by people who aren’t committed to doing it right. The quality of parenting will be carefully weighed at Final Judgment and appropriate consequences will be rendered to poor or irresponsible par-ents. Finally, I believe half-brainedness has been one of the principal obstacles to consilience – the unification of knowledge - between the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Consil-ience is a meta theory (a theory of theories) that posits a structure of fundamental paradigms that apply to all branches of knowledge, and, in fact, that the validity of a theory is enhanced by its pattern matching a pattern in some other field or fields. My favorite example of this is the exact correspondence between natural selection and laissez-faire economics. It is known, from his journal, that Charles Darwin was reading Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” within a week of his conceiving of the idea of natural selection. Evolution by natural selection also applies to the evolution of the physical universe, as well as the evolution of tools and other artifacts. In the meanwhile, after all the countless millennia of concerted effort for understanding and accomplishment, the current popular culture, at least as portrayed in the media and promoted by the morally challenged celebrities thereof, reflects a coddled and confused majority of our population that has lost its way and can’t find anything to believe in except, perhaps, the right of girls to kill their babies. And, on a cheerier note, I suspect that the final unification of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics will require a dramatic act of Bilateral Consciousness that will provide a new fun-damental paradigm that will tremendously advance the cause of consilience.
Good post. Too many valid points to even attempt at a response.
thank you
You did some outstanding research--that can be summed up in three words--Democrats are Traitors!
Good material, anon. Nice job.
I do know you do will know what this person do have had write thank you
thank you"My2Cents"I do have had read America person senator talk Gulags Aushwitz Pol pat itp...mmmmmmmmmmm...."Democrat".....communist.....evil....this person is total cretin be strong America good country!!!
"total cretin" is the nicest thing you could say about a person who has, by using those terms to describe our brave troops, put them in more danger than the enemy could. The terrorists have been emboldened to kill more of their own countrymen and to try to kill our men and women by these careless words! Thank you for bringing to our attention the treason on the part of these Democrats!
Too much supporting info for a point well made!
Be good persons Be strong America good country! Evil is Evil Good is Good Be good Be Strong Strong Strong!!!!thank you all
bump
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